Struggling to keep his breakfast down, Crocker awoke. Opened his eyes in the Omani hospital room, which was more familiar and real.
But the nausea was still with him, and the smell surrounded him, stronger than ever-entering his mouth, nose, skin, and eyes. Pulling the sheets aside, he searched for its source in the bed and underneath it, then in the room’s shadows, and found nothing.
Strange.
The room was empty. Walls painted with long dark shadows created by the moon. And he was alone.
Still the smell grew thicker, and his stomach was about to spasm.
Unable to stand it anymore, he removed his hand from his mouth and shouted, “Nurse! I need to see you! Quick!”
He slid out of bed and inspected his hospital gown again. Clean.
Where the hell is it coming from?
Growing more intense, traveling up his nose into his brain. If the bars weren’t blocking him, he would have jumped out the window.
Christ!
A young Asian nurse in white flung open the door and turned on the light. He stood squinting and doubled over in his light blue hospital gown by the edge of the bed.
“Sir, what’s wrong?” she asked, hurrying to his side.
“The smell is making me sick.”
“What?”
“The stench! The smell. Get rid of it. I can’t stand it. Please.”
“What smell?”
“What? You don’t smell it?”
She sniffed the air, then shook her head. “No, I don’t.”
“But-”
Unimaginable. Yet her face, her demeanor, the sound of her voice were all sincere.
That’s when Crocker remembered where he’d experienced the awful stink before. Emanating from the smoldering, eviscerated body on the floor of the suite in the Al Bustan Palace hotel.
The Asian nurse saw the troubled look in his eyes.
“Is there some way I can help you?” she asked.
The smell was some type of flashback. An echo of the trauma he’d endured, the violence, the fact that he’d narrowly escaped death.
“I’ll call a doctor,” she said as she helped him back into bed.
“That won’t be necessary.” He’d experienced flashbacks before, but they’d always been visual.
“It will just take a minute.”
“I was having a bad dream. I’m okay.”
Her expression remained compassionate and sweet. “If you want, sir, I can crack open the window.”
“That would be helpful. Thanks,” he said, slipping back under the covers, feeling like a little boy who had disturbed his parents’ sleep.
When he’d had nightmares as a child, his mother had told him to think of pleasant things. So he imagined himself and Holly hiking in the Shenandoah Valley. A beautiful late October day. The trees blazed with fall colors. As he conjured the smell of leaves and grass and burning firewood in the distance, the stench disappeared and he fell asleep.
“Boss?”
“What?”
“Wake up, boss.”
The SEAL team leader pushed himself up and rubbed his eyes, aware that he was still in the hospital and thinking he had to be somewhere else.
“Boss.”
“What is it?” Grasping for details in the half-conscious fog.
The face looming over him was unidentifiable because of the angle, but he recognized the voice-deep and resonant, with a hint of foreign accent. Akil.
“Akil, what’s going on? Did you find the girl?”
The Egyptian American looked thinner and paler than before.
“Not yet, boss. You feeling better?”
Funny, coming from him.
“Fine. Yeah. How about you? And how’d you get in here?” The reality of his circumstances was coming back, along with familiar aches and pains.
“I was running a fever,” the Egyptian American explained, “so they transferred me to the hospital, where I met Colonel Bahrami. You remember Colonel Bahrami, don’t you?”
“Who?”
A stiff-backed, uniformed man stepped out of the long shadow across the door, and Crocker recognized the intelligent, mustached face from the afternoon before.
“Oh, yes. Hello, Colonel.”
“Sorry to interrupt your sleep, sir, but your colleague told me you wouldn’t mind,” he said in his clipped British accent.
“Did I hear correctly? You still haven’t found the Norwegian girl?”
“Not yet, sir.”
Akil explained that the colonel had visited his room the night before and the two had started talking about their experiences growing up, their respective intelligence services, and what they perceived to be the primary threats to their countries.
Colonel Bahrami’s interest had been piqued when Akil mentioned Abu Rasul Zaman. He said that Omani intelligence was very concerned about al-Qaeda activity in the area, and particularly in Yemen. The colonel had explained that Oman, which continued to make an effort to get along with all countries, had a complicated relationship with its neighbor to the southwest that dated back to the 1970s, when Yemen had supported the pro-communist Dhohar rebels who were trying to overthrow the sultan of Oman. After the rebels were defeated, Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said had launched a diplomatic campaign to improve relations between the two neighbors, which had been successful in fostering trade and commerce.
But now Yemen was embroiled in political turmoil. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) controlled important territory in the south of the country, near the borders of Oman and Saudi Arabia, and seemed to be growing in strength. Meanwhile, Houthi Shiite rebels in the north were fighting a civil war that threatened to overthrow the government.
“What does this have to do with me and my men?” Crocker asked, shifting to the edge of the bed and flexing his knees.
Colonel Bahrami stood before him in his clean khaki uniform. His white teeth, dark eyes, and black mustache all gleamed, set off by his caramel-colored skin.
“The fact that this ship, the Syrena, is registered in Yemen and was used to smuggle these kidnapped girls into my country intrigues me,” he said with great seriousness.
“It intrigues me, too,” Crocker said.
“Your colleague Akil explained how a document found in Zaman’s safe house seems to connect him to this ship. Do you agree?”
“Yes. I do.”
“According to our people stationed in Khasab, the Syrena has already passed through the Strait of Hormuz and has entered the Persian Gulf,” Colonel Bahrami added.
Crocker looked up. “Bound for where?”
“Bushehr, Iran, apparently.”
The SEAL leader remembered, and as he did, the noxious smell seemed to rise again from the floor.
“I was under the impression that security at the strait was relatively tight,” Crocker remarked, squeezing shut his nostrils.
“All we know is that the ship had the necessary papers and clearances to get through. Where they came from, and whether or not they were fraudulent, is unclear.”
“And your people are a hundred percent sure that it has entered the Gulf?”
The Omani colonel grinned sheepishly. “The question I have, sir, the one that continues to trouble me, is this: Why would a Yemeni ship be bound for Iran? These two countries are barely on speaking terms. I think this is highly unusual.”
“I agree.”
Crocker ran a hand gently over his mouth and right eye. The swelling seemed to have subsided considerably, and most of the soreness was gone.
“I might know a way to find out more about the ship,” the American offered. The more he focused on the unfinished aspects of his mission, the more the smell seemed to subside.
“How?”
“I heard that two of the kidnappers were captured. Is that correct?”
“They’re under guard on an upper floor of this hospital.”
“Would it be possible for us to pay them a visit?”
“That could be complicated.”
“They were on the Syrena. They might be persuaded to tell us what they know,” Crocker reasoned.